Lynn T. White

Professor of Politics and International Affairs, Woodrow Wilson School

Lynn White is a professor in the Woodrow Wilson School, Politics Department, and East Asian Studies Program. He has in mid-1989 published a book about the effects of economic booms on local politics. In three of the places he is studying (Taiwan, the Shanghai Delta, and Thailand), quick growth has produced much money politics -- including cases in which court decisions, police, and judges have been bought. In a fourth (the Philippines), many decades of experience with competitive elections, free speech, and separation of powers has not yet produced much prosperity or equality for ordinary citizens. Accounts of democratic liberalism and unbiased treatment before the law should take more notice of the role of industrialization, over both short and long periods, in producing legal results. He has also written an essay on "Chinese Constitutional Currents" that is scheduled to appear in the January 2010 issue of *Modern China.* White teaches about China and about the political sociology of development.